When Facebook released its report on “co-ordinated inauthentic behavior,” it seems they left a few perpetrators out.
An investigation by NBC News has revealed that Facebook “excluded [its] most divisive rhetoric” when it announced the banning of 32 pages and accounts run by “bad actors” on the platform. While the social media giant did make some of the content public, it seems that some of the most controversial content was excised.
The aforementioned content was revealed by web archives of the deleted pages. The material targeted people with liberal politics, as well as those of Hispanic or African descent.
“Resisters” posted a June 27 rally event entitled “Stop Ripping Families Apart! Take over ICE HQ,” which 131 people later confirmed having attended. “Aztlan Warriors” posted disinformation about Mexican child labor during the Great Depression, intended to increase racial tensions.
And while Facebook has not revealed the true source of these campaigns, it has admitted that the tactics — specifically, those meant to divide Americans by race — are similar to the efforts of Russia’s Internet Research Agency during the 2016 Presidential race.
Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab director Graham Bookie told NBC that catching these subversive voices is a growing challenge. “The tactics are adapting, which makes detection increasingly difficult,” he said. “These accounts were harder to detect. There were less telltale signs that this was a disinformation operation.”
Regardless of intended target, these deceptions hurt all of us. Once these “bad actors” insert themselves into the conversation, people begin to lose faith in all sides of the debate. “If your overarching goal is to drive Americans further away from each other or sow discord generally, then this is achieving that,” Brookie said:
Even if a small disinformation operation is extremely successful, it has the potential to poison the well. You can have outsized impact even if you’re a small operation because it undercuts trust in our political discourse.
MSNBC contributor and former FBI agent Clint Watts said that their methods bait users into agreement with a certain point of view, so that they can later use the relationship to influence their voting. “The goal is to create fear in the audience that things are unstable and that democracy and its institutions are failing,” he said. “The Kremlin seeks to infiltrate audiences along any and all divisive social issues, then once the audience is won, push them politically.”
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